There comes a time, in a story you're writing, when you just have to kick back and say Fuck it. Let it go. Understand you will never control the muse or the ether from whence these stories come. You are a stenographer to ghosts haunting you, demanding their tales be told, and who still have the irritating ability to behave too goddamned human to be dealt with.
Seriously, arguing with those essences gets you nowhere except a one-way ticket to a lobotomy. All you can do, as a writer, is let it flow. Talk it through within yourself, sure...but don't let it take over. That is so easy to do...and death to the creation of it.
Reading my books for A Place of Safety, I now see the first three drafts were merely locking in the story and letting me know which characters will inhabit it. And Brendan is warning to advance with caution. It's like I'm barefoot and shattered glass is everywhere. Some people can walk on that with no trouble; others leave behind trails of blood and pain. I'm somewhat in-between.
She trained championship horses in Africa, became a bush pilot, was the first woman to fly from London to North America, was friends with Isaak Denison, and fucked anything and anyone she wanted, whether she was married or not. Some say she was the inspiration for Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca...as the first Mrs. DeWinter.
I wrote an award-winning screenplay about her...for two women who didn't have the rights to her story. They said they did. And I busted my ass. And I'm goddamned proud of what I wrote. But it was for nothing. It was my first lesson in the realities of Hollywood and the system, therein.
Carli is the same as Beryl in her attitudes. And I can use that to keep me focused on her reality.
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